SoylentNews

Well, I made it to Buffalo. It's been a little less than two weeks, and for the most part I really like the city. It's miles better than Erie, the public transit is amazing if somewhat pricier, and it's nice to see buildings more than 2 stories tall again.

There are some seriously bad parts of this city, of course. I refuse to go east of Main Street if at all possible, and will not get off the bus on Niagara Street between the 1000 block and its intersection with Vulcan Street near Tonawanda. The South Side is also said to be rather dangerous. But people tell me where I'm renting is "the ghetto" too and it doesn't feel that way at all, so...? Honestly, after some of the places I lived in NYC, it feels like a vacation home. If anything, it actually feels like a very small version of some of my old haunts in the Bronx, compressed way down and with houses instead of apartment complexes. Oh, and no #4 elevated subway, but eh.

I got an Instant Pot and OMG, this thing is a miracle worker. Steel cut oats every morning if I want them? Done. All kinds of soups, curries, and chillis? Done, and I'm making a nice one whose recipe I'll share a bit later if anyone wants. Its best trick for my purposes is being able to cook dried beans and/or mote pelado (giant white hominy) from scratch in an hour - 40 minutes plus time to come to pressure and 10 minutes' natural release before hitting the unsealing valve.

All in all, this is a definite step up over Erie. I never realized how slow and dumb that place was by comparison until moving back here. And while it's no Milwaukee, in many ways I like it better than Milwaukee (and Madison), seeing as I come from NYC to begin with. It feels more familiar, even down to the architecture. Some of the apartment buildings remind me of NYC so much it physically hurts to look at them, even.

In light of many recent developments, some of which Subsentient summarized in his latest journal, I'm thinking I may be too late to make it to Canada. But I can look down the street and just about see the Peace Bridge on a clear day or with a pair of binoculars. So if all hell breaks loose, I may very well just pack my backpack and ask for asylum at the border. I'm getting death premonitions again, so thick and fast they're an unending stream and it's becoming difficult to sleep or breathe properly. But if I do die because of what's coming, it won't be for lack of effort or planning or execution of said plans on my part; I will simply, like so many millions and millions of others, have simply gotten unlucky.

Wish me good luck. What's probably coming is a nightmare...

Just...read this LOL https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/matt-gaetz-mocked-coronavirus-wearing-223948359.html

Gaetz is a special kind of childish moron even for the Trump administration, and Lady Karma really could not have picked a better target to shit thin shit all over. I hope this guy's wetting himself every time his throat itches. Maybe pickling himself in booze-a-hol will help a bit...though, note to Mr. Gaetz, the recipe calls for isopropyl alcohol and glycerin, and it's topical, not oral.

...okay, there are two people karma could choose that would be even better: Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Pence is for me at the top of this list, since his willful inaction and religious whackaloonery precipitated an HIV crisis in Indiana so severe the federal government had to intervene. Drowning slowly in his own lung exudate would be a fitting and very poetic fate for him...and don't worry, after he's done it'll only take a few minutes in Hellfire before it's all evaporated out!

Trump being taken down by the virus he keeps calling a hoax and blaming on the Democrats (?!) would be perfect too. He's in his 70s, overweight as hell (if he's 239 pounds, I'm Callista Flockheart!), apparently doesn't sleep much, and subsists on a steady regimen of Diet Coke, covfefe, and hamberders. Oh, and well-done steak with ketchup, the nekulturny bastard.

But the best part of this? CPAC. This happened at CPAC, the epicenter of coronavirus trolling. I can't think of anything more fitting than CPAC turning into the major vector of coronavirus spread, and taking down the most deserving people in the nation. Of course they'll get the best treatment on earth--they have Medicare for All, after all, and on our dime!--but even if it doesn't kill these three waterheads, I'll still laugh myself hoarse.

The absolute best outcome would be if this virus ends the Trump administration, specifically because of their utter malicious incompetence in handling it. Let us not forget Trump's practice of hiring worthless yes-men has hollowed out the Cabinet and many federal agencies, not to mention he's explicitly gutted the CDC and specifically the pandemic response team. I can't think of a more poetically-just outcome of their willful mishandling of this pandemic than having it destroy them.

We live in interesting times indeed. Sweet Lady Karma, I wish you good hunting...

Feel free to flame away, everyone. I give fewer fucks than Deadpool barebacking a rabid honey badger well into the third day of a cocaine-and-PCP bender.

This one goes out to all the dogmatic "all regulation is bad hurr hurr" types we're infested with.

The single argument I see them falling back on when backed into a corner is something along the lines of "Yeah, well, X Y and Z regulations have been set up and perverted, so regulation itself is a threat and inherently bad!"

This is...I don't think there is a way to express in English how completely, utterly, boneheadedly, cynically, self-servingly, sneeringly, willfully wrong this is. No one with three sparking neurons would say this for its own sake. And what *that* means is that the people who *do* say this are using it as a flimsy dogmatic excuse to push their idiotic economic agendas.

Let me make this absolutely clear: this argument is the precise equivalent of saying "Well, cancer cells can turn off cell-cycle checkpoints like p53, so replication regulation mechanisms are bad for living things!" or "Yeah, well look what happens to human DNA when a retrovirus gets ahold of it. Cell division is anti-life!"

It is *exactly* the same argument, just made in context of the body politic rather than the body simpliciter. Anyone who makes this argument is a fool, a rube, a tool of the elite who no doubt don't even know they exist and would not thank them for their pathetic grovelling bootlicking.

In other words, KHallow (though we have others on this site infected with the disease). And yes, this is a call-out. Suck it up. I will never understand what drives people to kiss the boot that's stomping their skulls into a fine paste...though I fear it may be something as simple as "I suffer but $GROUP_I_HATE suffers more."

This is a fairly simple concept. Economies, of any sort, thrive on the flow of goods and services, for which money is an abstraction. Money (currency) may be thought of as something like electrical current or water; it does useful work only when it's moving ("velocity of money"), because it's a proxy for the movements of goods, resources, and services.

Capitalism has the potential, realized repeatedly, to produce staggering amounts of goods and services, and to keep the flow of same in motion. However, the profit motive is a concentrating tendency. In particular, it tends to accumulate both money and the goods/services/resources represented by money in fewer and fewer hands over time, and this effect is a positive feedback loop, i.e., the longer it goes on the more it potentiates and reinforces and accelerates itself.

The problem here is that this accumulation stagnates the economy. When money and the things it abstracts away stop circulating, useful work is not done. The knock of effects are economic malaise, increase in rent-seeking behaviors, and widening disparities between the rich and poor (which, again, are self-catalyzing). Bluntly, a consumer economy grinds to a halt when people can't buy stuff.

When this reaches its logical conclusion, we find the vast majority of resources, goods, money, land, and political power in the hands of a wealthy few, with the huge mass of the people as impoverished slave laborers or serfs. In a word: *feudalism.* Without proper regulations to make sure wealth keeps circulating, then, capitalism will inevitably degenerate into feudalism. Which is, ironically, the very state it was created to oppose ideologically! The reason this happens is because the drives behind both systems are the same: greed.

This seems to be an inevitable consequence of unrestrained human nature. I am told a slur against progressives is that they believe humans and human nature are perfectible; this is not something I have actually heard from any of them, so it's probably another stupid slur and can be safely disregarded. That said, if we don't make some serious changes to how we think about economic activity and the reasons for engaging in it, we're going to end up in a dystopian nightmare. Some could argue we already have, and others might say we never left it.

We are knee-deep in wharrgarrrbling white-supremacist bullshit. I don't think this site's going to last much longer as anything but Stormfront 2.0 at the rate things are going. Nevertheless, I'm the kind of person who can't just walk past a giant gibbering clusterfuck of wrong without snarking on it, so here goes.

Have you ever noticed that none of these people can give you a straight answer about what it is precisely to be "white?" I'd like to know when micks, dagos, polacks, and krauts...oops, pardon me, Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, and basically anyone not a WASP began to qualify as "white." What caused this sudden shift in the definition of whiteness, when did it happen, and why?

Also, scratch these cowardly little whiners a bit, and something interesting emerges. It's not white skin they seem to be after so much as "white culture." This, if anything, is even more ill-defined than simple "whiteness." Requests for clarification from, as a pertinent example, our very own XivLacuna, have proven to be...less than enlightening, shall we say. Apparently "white culture" is what raises property values and is more or less synonymous with being a good neighbor? But also apparently, very poor and extremely dysfunctional areas with majority or entirely white populations are *not* examples of "white culture" despite their demography, because something something hurrrarghl Jews and liberals and banning coal?

I don't even know what the fuck. This kind of incoherent blather is par for the course from white supremacists. Bunch of idiot historically-illiterate rebels without a clue, let alone without a cause. Sounds like a load of maladaptive, resentful little manchildren who think the world owes them a living and are looking for something, or someone, to break when it doesn't fall into their laps. Boo-stupid-hoo. How about you use that supposedly superior white-with-a-capital-W intellect and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps?

I'm not even going to touch on the complete avalanche of non-sequiturs, half-truths, whataboutisms, false dichotomies, or outright *lies* these people attempt to bury opposition under. I do notice, though, that when you counter them properly, they simply stop responding to you, as if that somehow means they won. And, holy god damn, I don't think I've ever seen goalposts move that fast; I'm pretty sure some of these boys are breaking the sound barrier here!

What it all boils down to is this: white supremacists are incoherent, ignorant, cowardly whiners, scared of their own shadows for being dark. I will never comprehend how empty, how gullible, how utterly suggestible, how completely in the grip of total moral and cognitive surrender someone would have to be to fall for a supremacy movement that can't even define itself internally!

In case any of this crowd of upstanding, rational, well-spoken pillars of society (ye gods...) would like to attempt to explain their agenda so that it makes something approaching coherent sense, I'm all ears :) I'm also prepared to be completely let down on that front, though will probably at least get some cheap laughs out of it.

This will be my final interaction with this site, which I have supported for several years. I even tried to lead a capital campaign to help support it barely a week ago, contributing a significant sum of my own money. It was a good attempt at an experiment.

Unfortunately, the past few days have reminded me that several of the admins and editors of this site have agendas that I disagree with. As I noted in previous journal entries, I strongly value civil discourse. I will admit that having perhaps a half dozen outbursts in my time here (usually when I was also under some personal stress), but none of us are infallible. Other than that, in my thousands of comments here, 99% of them have been trying to be productive, insightful, informative, and occasionally funny. I have never posted insincerely. I have never argued in bad faith. Once in a while, I will also admit to going a bit overboard in responding to a post that was acting like a jerk by acting a bit like a jerk in return, though I probably only went overboard to that extent a dozen times or so at most. Again, 99% of the time, I was trying to maintain a cool head and help promote better discussion on this site. My post history is there for all to see.

Several editors and admins here over time have questioned their commitment to civil discourse. Note that I have never advocated for getting rid of ACs or deleting comments or anything on that level. I believe in the idea of free speech, but I also believe that a community has a right to choose to listen to said speech or not. I believe moderation is intended to be a way to highlight to the community types of posts that are more likely to be valuable to the community, along with noting those that are disruptive as well as of low value to the community. As a recent thread has shown, there's a lot of disagreement in the community about the appropriate use of downmods, particularly (but not exclusively) the use of "troll" mods.

One takeaway I had from reading through the hundreds of comments on that thread is that there were several members of the community who used "troll" mods for things that aren't strictly trolling (according to some standard definitions), but they felt they had no other choices among the moderation options that fit the problematic quality of said posts. Quite a few of those posts were upmodded, many to +5, indicating that many in the community approved of these non-standard uses of certain downmods to address problematic posts. MartyB took a pragmatic and reasonable outlook in his first editorial commentary too -- calling some individual moderation decisions "small potatoes." I agree with him that no moderation will ever be perfect, and some people will always moderate in a way that other disapprove of. I've also argued in the past that individual moderation of individual comments should have less impact on community consensus of reputation (i.e., "karma"), particularly from one user directed repeated at another user. We seem to have solved that problem through occasional intervention with modbombs, but I think it's a larger problem that karma should truly be a reflection of community consensus from many users over time, while individual posts should be downmodded (or upmodded) at will for their quality, without a strong judgment that effectively is an "award" or "punishment" for behavior.

Janrinok was a notable dissenter in some of this early discussion, arguing that inappropriate use of moderation is a severe problem here and effectively viewing it as a sort of free speech issue. I sincerely disagree that it is anything like a free speech issue. Moderation reflects community consensus around posts. If we feel that a single mod is giving too much power in foregrounding or hiding some posts, then maybe we should consider expanding the range of post scores a bit. Janrinok seemingly doesn't get (or is willfully blind to) the fact that bad actors can overall lower our discourse here significantly, regardless of whether they meet some strict definition of "trolling" or whatever.

Janrinok the other day said:

If we cannot strive to meet the standards that we set ourselves 4 or 5 years ago then many will leave our community. One of the ways that we maintain standards is by having a moderation system that allows comments to be identified as being of good, or bad, quality.

We do NOT have moderations that allow comments to be identified as "bad." We have moderations that allow comments to be identified as "good," as well as punishment moderations that identify things that aren't really comments -- just games that trolls and such play. Actual comments that are "bad" -- like displaying factually incorrect information, or comments that are basically "non-responsive," or comments that clearly don't even understand an issue that's being discussed -- we have no way of downmodding those without using a questionably appropriate "punishment" mod. I'm not saying we should necessarily have such moderations as downmods. Maybe they should be neutral (like "disagree"). I don't have the answers. But we don't actually have effective ways of identifying bad comments, only disruptive interactions like spam and trolling that don't really even count as comments.

To be clear, I agree with Janrinok in that I don't want people to moderate solely based on difference of opinion. I do think it's right to downmod for several reasons I will outline below. Quoth Janrinok again:

If, however, that is what the community wants then we must be prepared to say goodbye to many of those who make valuable contributions to the discussions and, more importantly, are probably responsible for a significant part of the donations that we rely on to keep running.

Well, I'm leaving, because we aren't calling out the trolls ENOUGH. So take that as you will.

I know I'm not the only one because I spent much of the past week arguing with ACs and registered users on this site who feel that their voices are suppressed or that this site has been taken over politically. I defended this site, as I always had in the past, because I believed in the moral integrity at least of our site managers. However, I no longer believe that to be the case; hence my departure.

The Mighty Buzzard -- the other admin who was very active and vocal in the above-linked thread -- explicitly came out in favor of promoting hate-speech on this site. I know that "hate-speech" is a trigger word for some of you conservative folks, but (again) as I said above, I'm not arguing for any speech to be banned on this site. And I know that the term "hate-speech" is frequently used very broadly. But it is wrong to say, as TMB says, that "offense can only be taken, not given." There are things that civilized society understands are problematic within civil discourse. In the U.S., it is illegal to incite a riot. It does not fall under First Amendment speech protection to do so. One similar act in an internet forum is the type of speech that incites flamewars or otherwise disrupts discussion. I brought up the example of Jmorris (although I didn't name him), who commonly posts here both in insightful and trollish manners. But one thing he frequently does is to throw in some random anti-Semitic comment. This is not something one does in civil discourse. It's not intended to be funny. I'm not sure whether it's always serious or sometimes trolling, but it's just not productive to discussion here. It should be downmodded, regardless of any other contributions the comment makes. To not do so is like accepting a student in the class who volunteers to come up and work a problem on the board for everyone's benefit, but then urinates on the wall. You don't celebrate (or upmod) such behavior, regardless of how good his solution to the problem was.

And yet, TMB says it's not a problem. Maybe if such a comment gets to +5, we might consider modding it down as overrated, but otherwise an admin of our site is fine with high-scoring anti-Semitic comments here. In other comments, TMB made clear that he is also fine with high-scoring false information on this site. Yes, he argues that one way to combat false information is to provide correct information in reply. But he sees nothing wrong with that false information post continuing to have a high score.

Janrinok -- pay specific attention to that, because it is precisely what Azuma was trying to explain to you. That attitude is a "post-truth" attitude. It is an attitude where "all opinions should be heard," even when they are objectively and factually wrong. But it is a way that civil discourse is disrupted and ultimately destroyed as one cannot tell what is true and false anymore. We are living in a society where that breakdown is occurring -- whatever scores high in social media is what gets passed around as "truth." TMB wants that here as well. Furthermore, if such posts carry along a little extra negativity about the "Jews" or some other racial/ethnic/whatever slurs, no problem! As long as it a post says something of value, it deserves a high score in our community. We're supporting a bunch of jerks who just want to say something clever and then piss on the wall. Yes, that's what this site is.

You combine these things with an argumentation strategy that consists mostly of bluster -- just ignore any useful points or clarifications your opponents make, and steamroll through as if you are right, frequently acting calm while gradually pushing the edge to get people to accept more and more of your bullshit -- this is the strategy of self-identified trolls like Milo, who TMB supported in the past. Whether or not we want to use some sort of strict definition of "troll" that includes this stuff, it's a term that encompasses the behavior of people use self-consciously have used the word, like Milo. It's about a campaign of disinformation, of insincere argumentation, of getting people to accept bad actors as the norm, of pissing on the wall while objecting that you are a "good guy" for solving the problem on the board if anyone complains.

TMB has admittedly behaved himself a bit more in the past year or so, a trend which I have noted in the past. But when he comes out and says such things -- advocating pissing on the wall in this community as behavior that should be scored highly and not downmodded -- there needs to be swift and decisive action from the admins here. TMB is a liability to this site, specifically. In recent days, I've come to also question the behavior and opinions of other admins here too. I'd like to believe that the majority of editors and admins here are still acting with good faith, but with a known troll in your midst who is so prominent on this site, it is impossible to maintain integrity. I have come to realize that the ACs I fought this week to convince them of the values of this site, and even unhinged folks like Aristarchus, have a serious and legitimate point about the integrity of this site. As Azuma and others argued, the admins can't just ignore bad behavior from TMB and others in their midst, as well as the various occasional trolls here who are not admins -- they must call it out consistently and swiftly. And those who are granted privileges as admins, editors, etc. who cannot promote the integrity of this site need to be publicly called out and have privileges revoked, unless you want any user here to assume that their behavior is to be imitated and normalized on this site. (And it is not enough for TMB to say, "I don't have any say in what's posted" or whatever. He's one of the most prominent posters on this site and also everyone knows he's an admin of some sort -- his behavior needs to reflect the propriety of this site, if it retains any integrity anymore.)

I really did not intend this post to begin as a complaint primarily about TMB. Because he's only a small part of the problem. The problem here is the attitude that agrees with him, that doesn't value truth but instead is only about "winning" arguments, that encourages trolling and bad-faith posting on a whim, that says "meh" when disruptive and hateful speech is normalized. Once again, I am not arguing for censorship or deletion of posts. You have a right to say what you want. You do not, however, have the right to demand that others listen to you. As Acid Andy remarked insightfully on the "troll" mod thread linked above, I've seen very few troll mods on posts here that make legitimate arguments or state opinions in a respectful manner. (Perhaps the most insightful post among the hundreds there.) It's not about Emily Post fake etiquette, but it is about a culture of respect. This can be a place that enjoys an "off-color" joke occasionally without also promoting random anti-Semitic screeds. It can be a place that people can have sincere politicized disagreement without modding up false information. It can be a place that people assume good faith and try to respond with good faith, but also one that downmods those who act in bad faith or disrupt.

And sometimes those latter moderations can be wrong -- but listen to MartyB's original point above, as well as consider other ways to solve that moderation problem. Moderation should not be about reward or punishment: it should raise up the comments that are good for the community and lower those which are not useful to the community. That should be the intent, even if imperfect.

Lastly, I have severe concerns about the integrity of this site's governance. For years, as reflected in my posts, I have defended the integrity of process on this site. I do believe most admins and editors are likely acting in good faith. But my experience two days ago when I announced I was leaving created a rather disturbing situation. I do not feel it fair to leave this site without pointing out the potential danger to this community.

TMB posted one of his typical "ignore your points and just act like I'm correct and responded to you" posts, and admittedly I responded with a shouty and angry post. (That was also in response to some of his other posts referenced above.) I'm not proud of my reply, but I simply do not otherwise know how to react when an admin and prominent member of this community makes statements that so clearly go against what I believe about civil discourse. So, I wrote a journal post (not as long as this one) calling the other admins to action against TMB, to stand up to him. I also called out some of the stuff Janrinok said for criticism. I then declared I was leaving, and submitted my journal.

The next morning (yesterday), I woke up and just was curious to see the fallout, if any. I came to this site as an AC at first and tried to find the journal entry. It was gone. I logged in, and I still could not find it. I posted about it, because it was incredibly disturbing to me and a true affront to free-speech on this site. But I could see how after my attempt to run a sort of "pledge drive" last week, my financial and comment contributions, and my repeated defense of the integrity of this site... after all of that, a journal entry publicly announcing my departure due to severe problems with the admins of this site could be a public-relations problem. I never believed TMB or his allies would go so far, but there was the evidence in front of me.

I know that those reading this have to take my words on faith that I actually posted this journal, and it has been deleted. I know it's not TMB's usual modus operandi. I don't even know it was him. I just know that previously when I "took a break" from this site, I left for quite a while (and didn't even read comments), so maybe someone expected that I would do so this time and just wanted to get rid of the evidence. Now there's too many admins paying attention to this issue for something like that to transpire with this journal entry. (I hope.)

There are reasons why I specifically remember how I made this post and why I'm sure it was rightly submitted, which I've explained here. I don't have a screenshot or anything as corroborating evidence, but several things about this whole situation are weird (as I noted).

Some will brand me as a liar or conspiracy theorist or whatever for saying this. I know this. I'm just telling you, honestly, what I believe -- and that is that the integrity of this site is seriously breached and that I now believe it's possible many of the ACs (and even Aristarchus) who tried to tell me of the serious flaws in the management of this site are actually correct.

I leave this as a warning to the community. I encourage you all to seek out other forums and to leave this place, if you value integrity. Again, I can only offer my years of good comments and good behavior on this site as proof that I do NOT make such accusations lightly. Absent a serious audit and purge of some of the managers of this site, I see no other remedy.

I personally have also realized that my individual efforts are better directed at something productive online, rather than arguing about and rehashing divisive and polarized bullshit over and over. For years before I became active here, I contributed much more actively to a question-and-answer site online (which, notably, has much more successful moderation than here, though it's a bit more draconian, if entirely community-enforced). Yesterday, after alerting the community here of the breach of ethics, I spent a few hours there answering questions to help people who needed help. For the first time in a while, I actually felt good about my online activity. There are a lot of bright people here: I encourage you to consider devoting your energy to projects that will advance knowledge, value facts, try to understand others' positions rather than "win" arguments, and promote civil discourse in the world. The only way to save the world from the trolls is to adopt positive values such as these (which may not be an exhaustive list, but it's a good start).

I hope you all have nice lives. Farewell.

I've seen so many stories posted here and elsewhere in the past couple years about the new beef alternatives like the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger. I've heard the Beyond Burger is less meat-like, so I've waited to hear of an easy way to try the Impossible Burger. With Burger King making a big launch of it earlier this month, I finally decided to give it a shot today.

I ordered the Impossible Whopper, and (because I don't really know that I could remember what a regular Whopper tasted like) I ordered a regular Whopper beside it for comparison. I've read a lot of reviews, and I was interested in trying the Impossible Burger as many reviews claim it's enough like real meat that you might eat one unknowingly and not realize it wasn't meat.

Let me also clarify that I don't eat a lot of burgers (maybe once or twice per month), but when I do, I like real beefy burgers. I almost never order them out, because I'm almost always disappointed. I'm the guy who has experimented with grinding his own meat and blending different cuts together to make a better burger. I usually don't go to that trouble, but I do like grinding fresh to my liking and cooking real beef. I prepare burgers generally with a minimum of spices and filler to let the meat flavor come through. I know what real beef tastes like in a burger.

And the Impossible Whopper tastes nothing like real meat. It wouldn't fool me for a second. Now, I'll grant you that the actual "regular" Whopper also barely tastes like real meat to me, but it's still quite recognizable as a variant on those awful frozen burgers that family member you don't like buys a giant box of and feeds you on the Fourth of July or whatever. (Everybody knows those cheap frozen burgers, right?)

What does the Impossible Whopper taste like? I don't know, but it definitely has a sort of "essence of veggie burger" quality about it. Don't get me wrong: I actually like veggie burgers sometimes and occasionally order black bean burgers too. I have nothing against the veggie burger. Nor do I have anything against vegetarians -- I don't eat meat a lot of days and occasionally go for weeks or longer without eating significant meat (sometimes only used in small quantities for flavor or something). But the Impossible Whopper tastes like a veggie burger. Texture is more meat-like, I suppose, and it had a nice char (which is difficult on some kinds of veggie burgers), but the flavor was unmistakably "not meat."

Here's the weirdest thing I noticed, though -- I expected the loads of toppings on a Whopper to hide the taste of the burger. (Some reviews I've read said this explicitly.) But I found the best "meat-like" bites I had from the burger were when I tasted the patty by itself. Some of it was the char on some bits, but somehow the burger by itself -- while still not quite "meat" -- tasted much more "neutral" and less "veggie" when I tasted it by itself. When combined with all the rest of the toppings though, for some reason the flavor immediately screamed out to me as "does NOT taste like beef!"

There's no way I'd mistake this for beef, and there's no way if someone handed me a burger that tasted like this, I'd just assume it was beef. Maybe, just maybe, I could buy the idea that this was someone's strange excessive spice/additive concoction that transformed a beef patty into something that tasted less meaty, but there is something unmistakably "off" about the Impossible Burger.

I'm not saying I didn't like it, mind you. I'm saying it didn't taste like meat. The actual "regular" Whopper patty was relatively flavorless, so I wouldn't rate that high either. And if you asked me to choose which one had the better flavor, I'd have to say it was pretty close to a toss-up (with the "real" one barely winning out) -- but that's because I actually don't mind eating the occasional veggie burger and don't mind the "off" flavor.

What I'm struggling to understand is the market for this stuff. I've had other types of veggie burgers I've liked at least as much as this burger -- they're less meat-like in texture and flavor, but they have good flavor too. But most people I know who are vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons likely won't step foot into a Burger King, because of its huge connection to factory farms and meat/beef (which is environmentally costly), even if Burger King could grill the burger separately. And the other people I know who eat veggie burgers and such on occasion usually do so for health reasons to avoid so much red meat, but the Impossible Burger has nutritional facts that basically make it as "bad for you" as a typical fast food burger, along with some questionable new additives that are barely FDA approved.

Who is eating this thing? Why? For those people who may have had an Impossible Burger experience better than I am likely to have had at Burger King, would you suggest that I try it elsewhere? Or do you agree with this assessment?

I inadvertently excluded AC posts on my previous journal post. Apologies. And I don't think I can change comment options on an existing post. So I'm making another post in case others want to comment here. (And folks: let's keep the nonsense out of here, please. I'm opening comments up for discussion about the good of this site.)

As noted there, I have made a new donation (in addition to my previous subscription) of $200, and I've pledged to donate $100 more if we can get at least up to our semi-annual goal of $2000 by the end of August. See that linked journal entry for more thoughts on why we should do this.

Sulla has said there may be some Blackberry prizes available for those who donate, and he has donated $100 himself (as well as asking for someone to match him).

Will others join us? Challenge others? Pledge a match if we meet the goal?